Poland's Duda to forego Holocaust memorial event in Israel

[Jaga]

This anniversary is related to Auschwitz liberation, but Polish president was not given the chance to speak, instead Putin would play a big role at this event. This follows weeks of Putin accusing Poland of some historical misgivings during WW II: www.dw.com/en/poland-versus-putin-dispute-over-history/a-51847283

www.dw.com/en/polands-duda-to-forego-holocaust-memorial-event-in-israel/a-51921581

Poland's Duda to forego Holocaust memorial event in Israel

President Duda's government said it was 'inadmissible' to invite Russia's Putin to speak but not the leader of Poland. Duda had wanted a chance to correct what he perceives as "lies" about Poland's role in the Holocaust.

olish President Andrzej Duda said on Tuesday that he would not attend a Holocaust memorial event in Israel later in January despite being invited, because he had not been invited to speak.

"As the [Polish] president I will not take part in the event that will take place on January 23 in Jerusalem," he said.

Deputy Foreign Minister Pawel Jablonski had criticized the January 23 event at the Yad Vashem center in Jerusalem for asking Russian President Vladimir Putin to speak — among several other world leaders — but not the leader of Poland.

"It is inadmissible, at a conference dedicated to the Holocaust, for Vladimir Putin to be one of the key speakers and for Poland's president not to be able to speak at all,'' Jablonski said on national radio.

Duda said he had wanted to speak in order to counteract perceived "lies" that were being spread about Poland's role in World War II and the Holocaust, particularly recent comments from Putin that partially blamed Warsaw for the outbreak of World War II.

The majority of the German Nazi regime's death and concentration camps were located in what is today Polish territory, and ethnic Poles were among the groups selected for death by Hitler's war machine. About 1.8 million ethnic Poles and 3 million Polish Jews perished in the Holocaust.

In recent years, however, Poland and Israel have at times found themselves at odds over what some see as Warsaw's attempts to rewrite history, for example, regulations that make it more difficult for researchers to investigate how some Poles turned on their Jewish neighbors.

[Jaga]

Putin had a speech and he did not mention Poland by name but he said that many other nationalities collaborated with the Nazi. He said that Slavs among them Poles were treated as subhumans

[Jaga]

here is the article that explains Russia's part of the game and also what they consider the Poland mistakes. They don't get deep enough to present how Israel is playing its game also.

www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/01/23/russia-poland-are-playing-political-games-with-holocaust/

International leaders have already started marking the 75th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz concentration camp. Soviet troops captured the camp and freed its prisoners on Jan. 27, 1945. The Nazis had founded Auschwitz on the soil of occupied Poland in May 1940, not long after invading the country. It’s estimated that around 1 million Jews (many of them Polish citizens) were murdered there. Soviet prisoners of war as well as Polish priests and intellectuals died in the camp, too.

The first round of ceremonies is taking place Thursday in Jerusalem. Among the guests of honor is Russian President Vladimir Putin, who has already given a speech about the war. His Polish counterpart, Andrzej Duda, is boycotting the event after being told he would not be allowed to speak.

On Monday, another round of ceremonies will take place in Auschwitz itself. Many of the same leaders will attend that event — except for Putin, who is not invited. Duda will be speaking.

Putin has been causing a stir by attacking the well-established historical consensus on the outbreak of World War II. His apparent aim: to divert attention from the notorious Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of August 1939, in which Hitler and Stalin secretly divided up Eastern Europe among themselves and established an alliance that lasted for the first two years of the war. The Soviet Union’s invasion of Poland on Sept. 17, 1939, and its annexation of the territory it seized, became the prelude to the killing of 22,000 Polish officers by Soviet executioners in the forests of Katyn. This is a big part of the story that Putin prefers to gloss over.

For Putin, whitewashing the Soviet legacy is nothing new. As part of his long-standing effort to restore Russian national pride, he has even ordered the rewriting of school textbooks in order to downplay Stalin’s crimes.

Yet his latest comments on the outbreak of the war have taken a revealing direction. Putin has focused on Poland’s alleged perfidy in the years leading up to 1939, when its leaders were desperately trying to stave off Nazi aggression — in some cases by making deals with the Nazis themselves. He spotlighted the anti-Semitism of some prewar Polish officials and effectively blamed Warsaw for starting the war. The speaker of the State Duma, the lower house of the Russian parliament, called on Poland to “apologize” for facilitating the Holocaust.

But why Poland? And why now?

Since it came to power in 2015, Poland’s ruling right-wing Law and Justice Party has been pushing its own distinctly nationalist version of history. Two years ago, it passed a law criminalizing any mention of Polish complicity in the Holocaust; Parliament later softened the law after an international outcry, but the government has continued to prosecute or sue Holocaust historians. State media have embarked on a campaign to vilify and silence critical voices, the University of Ottawa’s Jan Grabowski told me in an interview: “Nowadays being an independent historian of the Holocaust in Poland is a very risky proposition.”

[pieter]

Jaga,

I hope that one day the Israëli's and the Poles, the Palestinians and Israëli's, Poles and Russians, Russians and Americans, Hutu's and Tutsi's, the Russians and the Ukrainians, the Saoudi's and the Iranians, the Sunni's and Shia's, the Secular jews and Orthodox jews, Northern Irish Roman Catholic Republican Nationalists and Northern Irish Loyalist Ultster (Pro-British) Unionist Calvinist Protestants, Blacks and Whites in South Africa, Armenians and Turks, Turks and Kurds, Kurds and Arabs (in Syria and Iraq), Blacks and Whites in the USA, and Aboriginal Australians and Native European Australians, Maoiri New Zealanders and Anglo Saxon New Zealanders can get along. Humanity has a long way to go. There will be Always anti-semite Poles, Russians and Ukrainians on one side and Polonophobe, Slavophobe Israëli's and Diaspora jews in the USA and Europe on the other side. And the same Polonophobe and Slavophobe jews can be racist as white people like white christians and white Muslims and white far right bigots.

I get tired of that racism, xenophobia, stereotypes, discrimination, hatred, anti-semitism, Polonophobia, Slavophobia (fear, resentment, hatred of and aversion against Central- and Eastern-Europeans in certain Western-European countries) and Islamophobia, because I can get along, have worked with, went out with, drank with, partied with, spoke with, argued with, disagreed with and agreed with people of all races, ethnicities, colours, social classes and thus backrounds. I could and I can get along, have worked with, went out with, drank with, partied with, spoke with, argued with, disagreed with and agreed with Western and non-Western christians (Arab and African christians, Maronites, Coptic people, Assyrian christians and Ghanese African christians), Jews (Dutch Diaspora jews and Israëli's -I know one Israëli woman in the Arnhem muncipality city council, she is from Tel Aviv and a leftwinger- A Peacenik, and probably she belongs to the leftwing minority in Israel-. This Israeli woman is very nice and her Polish jewish father comes from Ziębice, a town in Ząbkowice Śląskie County, Lower Silesian Voivodeship, in south-western Poland, she told me last week. This woman get's along fine with Arnhem Muslims with an Iranian, Turkish, Kurd and Moroccan background. Zero problems. They know she is Israseli and Jewish and she knows they are Sunni Muslim and Shia Muslim in the Iranian case. She is connected to the Dutch Greenleft party - Groenlinks in Dutch - and the Israëli Meretz party - en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meretz - . Most Dutch jews are more rightwing than her and will find her naive, to appeasing and to close with Muslims. ), Muslims (Turks, Kurds, Iranians, my Afghan tv colleague, Indonesian and Surinamese Muslims), Surinamese Hindu's, Buddhists and Dutch Bahai people. Some systems, ideologies, political movements, political parties and leaders thrive on discord, tension, hatred, division and agitation. In the same time in this world we have to go on, live on and make the best of it. The 'Other' won't go anywhere. We may dislike or hate his or her presence, but he and she are there. We have to deal with that.

I believe in Emmanuel Levinas ethics from the experience of the encounter with the Other. For Levinas, the irreducible relation, the epiphany, of the face-to-face, the encounter with another, is a privileged phenomenon in which the other person's proximity and distance are both strongly felt. "The Other precisely reveals himself/herself in his/her alterity not in a shock negating the I, but as the primordial phenomenon of gentleness." At the same time, the revelation of the face makes a demand, this demand is before one can express, or know one's freedom, to affirm or deny. One instantly recognizes the transcendence and heteronomy of the Other.

All people thrive best if there is some mutualism, exchange of ideas, communication, coexistence, trade, fusion of cultures and music, an effort to know 'the other', mediation in cases of conflict, diplomacy in staid of war, respect of the others autonomy, sovereignty, Independence and positive Patriotism. Asians have their way of doing things, Africans their own ways, Polynesians their Oceanic ways (like the Indigenous Hawaiian Hoʻoponopono practice of reconciliation and forgiveness), the Europeans their ways, the Middle eastern Semitic, Turkic, Kurd and Persian peoples their ways and the Ural and Caucasus their ways.

This afternoon I filmed in a Arnhem bistro where people eat their breakfest (if they are early), a lunch, have a coffee or orange jus or dinner. Three quarter of the customers were Moroccan Dutch. Just people. Clearly one group had a business appointment. Another duo, a bearded Muslim spoke in a quiet voice with another Moroccan man without a beard. A third Moroccan duo simply enjoyed a lunch. No problem, just people. Moroccan customers, Dutch bistro, Dutch employee's and Dutch owner. They didn't went to the Moroccan bistro a few buildings furter in the same street. They did their thing and I interviewed the Dutch owner. In the larger world, nations can't get along and thrive on old stereotypes all the time. Russians and Poles never can get over their old differences, neither can the Palestinians and Israëli's, neither the jews and the Poles. Sometimes I think get over it. Wake up, it is 2020, not 1926, 1933, 1939, 1941 (Jedwabne pogrom), 1943, 1944 or 1945/1946 (Kielce pogrom). It is 2020 people. Wake up, people, societies and nations have changed.

Cheers,
Pieter

[karl]

History is as it is, but written history as written by the victors will most always be in the best light no matter the reality.

War is a very dirty business of which most all hands are not clean. If reality was to be dug up, history in truth might then be viewed as it was in that war and those that propagated such an event for all to see.

Karl